[ifyoubuildit]

Sounds like you just did your own research, no? And you sort of cited your source.

Now someone can look at what you said and decide how confident they are with what you claim. From my perspective, I can take what you wrote as someone's honest opinion based on stuff that comes across their social feeds. I wouldn't treat it as ground truth, but I can feel confident that at least one person in the world has had that experience.

If someone makes a claim and points to a few studies that I can cross check, even if I'm not qualified to evaluate the studies, I can have some confidence that some domain experts have given evidence for the claim. I can also look for studies that contradict the claim, and in their absence, I can know that some experts believe xyz and I can't find any experts that disagree.

That's about the best I can do as a layman, and I think it's a lot better than nothing.

[msla]

> Sounds like you just did your own research, no?

People doing their own research isn't what we're talking about.

People saying "Do your research!" and what it correlates with is what we're talking about.

[ifyoubuildit]

So you've come up with a heuristic that says 1) doing your own research is fine, and 2) people who tell you to do 1) are suspect?

If so, I can't imagine thats very effective. You're probably better off just assuming strangers don't know what they're talking about unless you have some good reason to believe otherwise.

[msla]

No, I think that people who treat "Do your research!" as an argument are peddling suspect information.

If they had good information, they'd have good sources.